From T-Swift's "Shake It Off," to punk rock's elitism of anti-elitism, to country music's explicit self praising with lines like, "We're the fabric of this nation and we're a nation all our own," in different tunes the singers say the same thing: we are good people, and we are better than you.
She said people responded to self-praise negatively or, more subtly, with a long silence or a roll of the eyes.
She is not averse to self-praise, saying things of herself which are true but which others might leave for someone else to point out.
But if it's not enough to stay mum with the self-critique, then I actually have to start to self-praise — and give voice to it regularly in my girls' presence.
The author of one essay describes with some approval how a friend and her new boyfriend went into couples counselling to deal with his "clutter problem" (the mind boggles); several have a tendency both to overshare and to self-praise ("One thing I have never been insecure about is my intelligence").
The worst of it comes from those residing in the majority's self praise of being the normal ones; those who took it for granted that Aborigines were inferior, dying out, that their land was terra nullius, that their civilisation demanded the fluffing of a pillow; those who took it for granted that women are genetically disposed to find a place in the kitchen and bedroom.
Now before I dive into self praise, some context: After the first debate, we did a small experiment based on a random sampling of social media posts using labelled data feeds, a CNN (convolutional neural network; a feed-forward artificial neural network), a Bayesian methods-based network and a variant of word2vec-like algo.
The rest is self-praise plus the usual piffle.
But associates say Ms. Goldberg tends to avoid self-praise.
Sincere, unironic collective self-praise has its place.
Asked to describe himself, he declined: "My mother always said self-praise is no praise".
